One Laptop Per Child may have seemed overly ambitious, but the fact is they have been making an increasing impact as they have progressed through their mission.  (Learn more about their mission here and here.)  The one possible criticism against the program might be its price point: $100 for a laptop is cheap but can you give anyone a $100 computer?

That program is doing great and I would not want to discount their successes.  However, there is a new player in this interesting corner of the computing world.  Raspberry Pi is about to introduce a $25 computer ($35 with twice the RAM and a NIC).  It’s still under development (somewhere between alpha and beta phases) but it’s looking very strong for its November release schedule.

Here is a talk about their goals (which consist essentially of eliminating the price problem in getting computers into the hands of future developers):

Here they run a demonstration of Quake (the computer game) on this tiny machine:

And here you get to see their two hardware prototypes (the large one in beta and the small one I believe is a production prototype):

What I find particularly interesting is that they have managed to pack all of this computer into something as small as a USB stick (their final version intends to be about as big as a credit card with all the necessary connections—audio, video, NIC, USB, power).

Bravo, fellas.  Keep going.